Percent of funds Allocated towards an Inclusive Recovery in the Region
65%Percent of funds Allocated towards an Inclusive Recovery in the City
55%Percent of funds allocated toward an Inclusive Recovery in the County:
85%
Rochester Region Federal Funds Dashboard
How the Rochester Region Is Spending Federal Recovery Dollars
This dashboard is a draft undergoing active development. It should not be shared or used for analysis.
The federal government provided unprecedented levels of flexible relief funds to local governments across the country, including those in the Rochester region, to help them recover from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the City of Rochester and Monroe County continue to allocate and spend these federal recovery funds, they have an unparalleled opportunity to not only stimulate economic recovery, but to increase equity and remediate some of the past inequities that have been built into our nation’s laws and programs. To do so, the funds must be used to ensure that everyone–especially historically excluded groups–can benefit from and contribute to economic growth.
To increase transparency in this process, this dashboard tracks data on how the City of Rochester and Monroe County have allocated and spent State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds (SLFRF) provided through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). SLFRF must be obligated by the end of 2024 and spent by the end of 2026. The dashboard focuses on SLFRF because of their flexibility in giving local governments authority to decide how they should be spent. And, we focus on how well these allocations align with the building blocks of an inclusive recovery and equitable growth, shown below.
The Building Blocks of An Inclusive Recovery and Equitable Growth
The dashboard is laid out as follows:
- Alignment of allocations with the building blocks of an inclusive recovery, shown above
- How funds are being spent by policy area and subtopic
- Alignment of allocations with Rochester Area Community Foundation’s priorities
- Mapping of the City of Rochester’s SLFRF capital investments onto original redlining maps for the city and current racial characteristics of neighborhoods
- Detailed table of all allocations and their descriptions
Note: This dashboard does not track outcomes from these investments – it only shows where the dollars are flowing. Simply allocating funds toward topics that could increase equity and inclusion does not guarantee that they do so. Future research efforts should closely monitor outcomes and impacts from the recovery dollar investments to ensure that they close equity gaps exacerbated by the pandemic and address the root causes of inequities.
How Much is Being Spent on an Inclusive Recovery?
Previous work by the Urban Institute identified five building blocks of an inclusive recovery. These building blocks were created in collaboration with community stakeholders across the country and include:
- Create jobs for residents hardest hit by the pandemic or who face the greatest barriers to employment
- Connect historically excluded residents to jobs and economic opportunities, including through workforce development, child care, transportation, or broadband
- Reinvest in disinvested communities and address long-standing disparities in access to education, capital, economic opportunities, and climate resilience
- Stabilize housing and expand affordable housing options for low-income households and housing-insecure renters
- Create opportunities for low-wealth households to build wealth.
By our estimation, 65% of city and county funding has been allocated towards the building blocks of an inclusive recovery and equitable growth. Figure 1 below shows the total amount of funding for Rochester and Monroe County that was allocated to programs that align with these building blocks, based on review of the program description and goals.
These Data in Action
These number have real effects on people’s lives. For example, [insert GI recipient’s name], seen below, received funding through the City of Rochester’s Guaranteed income pilot. This means that she received $X each month over [time period]. This helped her XYZ.
Out of the 65% of funds allocated to programs that align with the five building blocks of an inclusive recovery, the most funding has been allocated to reinvesting in disinvested communities while the least has been allocated to creating jobs for residents hardest hit by the pandemic or who face the greatest barriers to employment. Figure 2 below shows how that funding is divided among the five building blocks and includes only the funds allocated to programs that align with the building blocks (the 65%).
How might Rochester invest more in some of these building blocks?
Other places have found ways to use federal funds to invest in stabilizing housing, building wealth, and creating jobs. For instance, the City of Boston is using ARPA funds to transform publicly-owned land into green, mixed income communities. One project in Chinatown, shown below, will include 83 affordable rental units and 36 affordable homeownership units. The property is a short walk to two train stops and is located in a walkable and bikeable neighborhood. The project was developed after extensive community engagement with nearby neighbors and will also be energy efficient and follow the City of Boston’s Carbon Free, Climate Resilient, and Healthy Community goals.
What policy areas are being funded?
Figure 3 shows how funding has been allocated across policy categories and includes all allocations, not just those that align with the building blocks of an inclusive recovery.
By category, most of the funds have been allocated to Community and Economic Development, Infrastructure, and Housing, while the least have been allocated to Operations, Public Health and COVID-19 Response, and Social Services.
What subtopics are funded within each policy area?
The figure below provides a more detailed breakdown of allocations to each policy area. Each policy area tab breaks down the allocations into subtopics. For example, most of the money allocated to community and economic development has gone to workforce development.
What does this look like in action?
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How much has been spent?
The City of Rochester and Monroe County have allocated almost $301M in SLFRF funds, and, of those, 14.6% have been reported as spent.
How does funding align with the Rochester Area Community Foundation’s priorities?
The Rochester Area Community Foundation’s key priorities for investment in the region include:
Closing the academic achievement and opportunity gap
Fostering racial and ethnic understanding and equity
Partnering against poverty
Supporting arts and culture
Preserving historic assets
Advancing environmental justice and sustainability
Promoting successful aging
Overall, 61.1% of SLFRF funding has been allocated towards these priority areas.
The figure below shows how SLFRF funding is divided among the priority topics and includes only the funds allocated to programs that align with one of RACF’s priority areas. The majority of the aligned funds are for partnering against poverty, followed by advancing environmental justice. Less well funded through SLFRF are preserving historical assets, promoting successful aging, and supporting arts and culture.
An example: RENEW
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Which neighborhoods are the funds being spent in?
The map below shows how the City of Rochester’s SLFRF capital investments map onto racial characteristics of neighborhoods, as well as the original Federal redlining maps for the city. Click on the tabs at the top to see how they overlap with the percent of residents who are Black in a neighborhood and the percent of residents who are Hispanic/Latino in a neighborhood.
Redlining refers to the system that the Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation used to grade the profitability of neighborhoods in the late 1930s. The four categories were green (areas most desirable for lending purposes), blue (still desirable), yellow (declining), and red (the riskiest for mortgage support). These grades were largely based on the neighborhood’s racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious composition. Generally, White, middle-class neighborhoods received FHA home loans, whereas many Black and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods were deemed hazardous and declining in value and did not receive FHA insured mortgages or loans. These maps had long lasting effects on racial segregation, homeownership, and house values in redlined neighborhoods.
To increase equity in the region, leaders must focus investments in communities that have been underinvested in historically. These investments must be those that , meaning that they should not be investments that only benefit new, incoming wealthier residents, or those that have negative impacts on immediate neighbors, like a sewage treatment facility or a highway that pollutes the air. And, they must be investments that , particularly historically excluded members. The maps below give us a first approximation of how equitably investments are distributed. We encourage further exploration of how these investments align with the goals of community members and how much they benefit historically excluded residents.
What does this look like?
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Explore All Programs Funded
This table shows all programs that the City of Rochester and Monroe County have allocated SLFRF funds to, as well as their building block, policy area, policy subtopic, and RACF priority area category. The default display on the table shows the programs in order from largest to smallest allocation. You can use the arrows next to each column title to sort the table by that column, and you can use the search bars under each column or the overall search bar to search the table.
Note: Data on spending were only available from the City of Rochester
Data current as of: 08/22/23
About the Dashboard
This dashboard was created by the Urban Institute in partnership with and support from ACT Rochester and Rochester Area Community Foundation (RACF) to visualize Monroe County and the City of Rochester’s ARPA spending by the five building blocks of inclusive recovery, policy category, and RACF’s investment priorities. By tracking recovery funding expenditures, this dashboard allows us to monitor public spending by the categories most critical in supporting an inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
For more information about the dashboard, please contact Meg Norris (ACT Rochester) or Christina Stacy (Urban Institute).
Click For Glossary of Terms
The code used to create this dashboard was writen by Manuel Alcalá Kovalski and can be found on GitHub.